GIFT  OF 


Sngetaoll  Eectutea  on  Jmmortalttg 


IMMORTALITY  AND  THE  NEW  THEODICY.  By 
George  A.  Gordon.  1896. 

HUMAN  IMMORTALITY.  Two  supposed  Objections 
to  the  Doctrine.  By  William  James.  1897. 

DIONYSOS  AND  IMMORTALITY:  The  Greek  Faith 
in  Immortality  as  affected  by  the  rise  of  Indiv- 
idualism. By  Benjamin  Ide  Wheeler.  1898. 

THE  CONCEPTION  OF  IMMORTALITY.  By  Josiah 
Royce.  1899. 

LITE  EVERLASTING.    By  John  Fiske.     1000. 

SCIENCE  AND  IMMORTALITY.      By  William  Osier. 

1904. 
THE  ENDLESS  LIFE.  By  Samuel  M.  Crothers. 

1905. 
INDIVIDUALITY  AND  IMMORTALITY.  By  Wilhelm 

Ostwald.     1906. 

THE  HOPE  OP  IMMORTALITY.  By  Charles  F. 
Dole.  1907. 

BUDDHISM  AND  IMMORTALITY.  By  William  S. 
Bigelow.  1908. 

Is  IMMORTALITY  DESIRABLE?  By  G.  Lowes 
Dickinson.  1909. 

EGYPTIAN  CONCEPTIONS  OF  IMMORTALITY.  By 
George  A.  Reisner.  1911. 

INTIMATIONS  OF  IMMORTALITY  IN  THE  SONNETS 
OF  SHAKESPEARE.  By  George  H.  Palmer. 
1912. 

METEMPSYCHOSIS.  By  George  Foot  Moore. 
1914. 


METEMPSYCHOSIS 


TTbe  Undersoil  lecture,  1914 


METEMPSYCHOSIS 


BY 

GEORGE  FOOT  MOORE,  D.D.,  LL.D. 

Frothingham  Professor  of  the  History  of  Religion 
in  Harvard  University 


CAMBRIDGE 

HARVARD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 
LONDON:  HUMPHREY  MILFORD 

OXFORD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 
IQI4 


Af 


COPYRIGHT,  IQI4 
HARVARD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 


THE  INGERSOLL  LECTURESHIP 

Extract  from  the  will  of  Miss  Caroline  Haskell  Ingersoll,  who  died  in 
Keene,  County  of  Cheshire,  New  Hampshire,  Jan.  26,  1803 

First.  In  carrying  out  the  wishes  of  my  late  beloved 
father,  George  Goldthwait  Ingersoll,  as  declared  by  him 
in  his  last  will  and  testament,  I  give  and  bequeath  to 
Harvard  University  in  Cambridge,  Mass.,  where  my 
late  father  was  graduated,  and  which  he  always  held  in 
love  and  honor,  the  sum  of  Five  thousand  dollars 
($5,000)  as  a  fund  for  the  establishment  of  a  Lectureship 
on  a  plan  somewhat  similar  to  that  of  the  Dudleian 
lecture,  that  is  —  one  lecture  to  be  delivered  each  year, 
on  any  convenient  day  between  the  last  day  of  May  and 
the  first  day  of  December,  on  this  subject,  "  the  Im- 
mortality of  Man,"  said  lecture  not  to  form  a  part  of 
the  usual  college  course,  nor  to  be  delivered  by  any 
Professor  or  Tutor  as  part  of  his  usual  routine  of  in- 
struction, though  any  such  Professor  or  Tutor  may  be 
appointed  to  such  service.  The  choice  of  said  lecturer 
is  not  to  be  limited  to  any  one  religious  denomination, 
nor  to  any  one  profession,  but  may  be  that  of  either 
clergyman  or  layman,  the  appointment  to  take  place  at 
least  six  months  before  the  delivery  of  said  lecture. 
The  above  sum  to  be  safely  invested  and  three  fourths 
of  the  annual  interest  thereof  to  be  paid  to  the  lecturer 
for  his  services  and  the  remaining  fourth  to  be  expended 
in  the  publishment  and  gratuitous  distribution  of  the 
lecture,  a  copy  of  which  is  always  to  be  furnished  by 
the  lecturer  for  such  purpose.  The  same  lecture  to  be 
named  and  known  as  "  the  Ingersoll  lecture  on  the 
Immortality  of  Man." 


303066 


METEMPSYCHOSIS1 

THE  belief  that  man  somehow  sur- 
vives death  is  universal.  To  the 
untutored  mind  death  is  not  the 
cessation  of  a  delicately  balanced  system 
of  bio-chemical  functions,  but  the  de- 
parture from  the  body  of  something  real 
and  substantial,  the  living,  breathing, 
speaking,  moving  part  of  man  —  the 
soul.  Dreams,  in  which  the  dead  appear 
in  form  and  act  like  their  living  selves, 
give  greater  distinctness  to  the  imagi- 
nation: the  soul  is  a  vaporous  double  of 
the  body,  usually  invisible,  but  capable 
of  sensible  manifestation  and  even  —  as 
in  nightmare  —  of  energetic  materializa- 
tion. 

The  souls  of  the  dead  haunt  their  for- 
mer abodes;  their  kinsmen  set  out  food 
and  drink  for  them,  without  which  even 


2  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

ghosts  starve;  tombs  are  built  and  fur- 
nished for  their  habitation.  Or  the  dead 
are  imagined  to  be  gathered  in  the  caver- 
nous recesses  of  the  earth  as  in  a  vast 
common  tomb;  they  migrate  to  unfre- 
quented regions  beyond  the  mountains 
or  over  the  seas,  where  they  lead  a  life 
like  that  on  earth,  but  exempt  from  all 
its  evils;  or  they  ascend  the  sky  and 
dwell  in  the  sun  and  the  moon.  Diverse, 
and  to  our  thinking  contradictory,  no- 
tions often  exist  side  by  side  without 
conflict;  sometimes  they  are  harmonized 
by  the  belief,  not  uncommon  among 
savages,  that  man  has  more  than  one 
kind  of  soul. 

The  social  distinctions  of  this  world 
are  carried  over  into  the  other.  Chiefs, 
heroes,  priests,  by  virtue  of  their  divine 
origin,  or  in  requital  of  their  great  deeds, 
or  through  their  potent  magic,  are  trans- 
lated to  Elysian  fields  or  admitted  to  the 
company  of  the  gods,  while  the  common 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  3 

herd  crowd  the  murky  realms  of  Hades. 
Moral  distinctions,  also,  come  by  de- 
grees. The  abominably  wicked  are 
hurled  into  nether  darkness,  the  emi- 
nently good  are  given  a  place  in  heaven. 
Finally,  retribution  becomes  universal: 
every  soul  receives  its  deserts,  whether 
good  or  bad.  The  first  conception,  like 
the  beginning  of  earthly  justice,  is  re- 
taliation—  man  suffers  what  he  has 
made  another  suffer  —  and  this  poetical 
justice  contributes  reality  and  variety  to 
all  the  infernos  of  later  imagination. 

Besides  the  question,  What  becomes  of 
the  soul  after  death  ?  men  early  asked 
its  counterpart,  Whence  comes  the  soul 
of  a  living  man  ?  It  is  universally  as- 
sumed that  it  comes  from  without,  and 
enters  the  body  of  the  infant  at  birth  or 
the  embryo  at  quickening;  and  the  belief 
is  very  wide-spread  that  the  souls  of 
deceased  ancestors  or  kinsmen  are  so 
re-embodied.  Family  likeness  in  feature 


4  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

and  disposition  is  thus  accounted  for; 
and  methods  of  more  particular  identifi- 
cation are  sometimes  practised,  by  which 
the  child's  name  is  ascertained. 

Savages,  knowing  no  difference  in 
kind  between  themselves  and  other  ani- 
mals, of  whose  superiority  in  strength  or 
cunning  they  have  frequent  experience, 
and  whose  mysterious  and  uncanny 
powers  seem  a  kind  of  magic,  attribute 
to  them  souls  like  their  own,  and  it  is 
generally  believed  that  the  soul  of  a  man 
may  be  reborn  in  a  beast  and  conversely. 
Tales  of  were-wolves  fill  a  large  room  in 
folklore;  transformations  by  witchcraft, 
and  the  power  of  sorcerers  to  extract  the 
soul  of  a  living  man  and  ban  it  in  a  tree 
or  animal,  are  common.  The  premises  of 
the  transmigration  of  souls  are  thus 
found  in  savage  psychology  all  the  world 
over. 

Into  this  circle  of  ideas,  also,  retalia- 
tion, the  rudimentary  form  of  justice, 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  5 

enters.  The  soul  of  a  man  who  has  done 
heinous  wrongs  to  his  fellows  in  this  life 
will  be  born  in  another  life  to  be  the  vic- 
tim of  like  evils.  Or  the  embodiment  of 
the  soul  corresponds  to  the  character  it 
displayed  in  its  former  existence.  Thus, 
to  .take  examples  at  random  from  the 
Law-book  of  Manu  :2  Men  who  delight  in 
doing  hurt  become  beasts  of  prey;  those 
who  eat  forbidden  food  become  worms; 
for  stealing  meat  man  is  born  as  a  vul- 
ture; for  stealing  grain  he  becomes  a  rat; 
for  stealing  perfumes,  a  musk-rat;  and 
so  on.  He  who  unlawfully  kills  an  ani- 
mal will  in  future  births  suffer  as  many 
violent  deaths  as  the  slain  beast  had 
hairs.3  Defects  and  deformities  are  of 
similar  origin:  "  In  consequence  of  a 
remainder  of  guilt,  are  born  idiots, 
blind,  deaf,  and  deformed  men,  all  of 
whom  are  despised  by  the  virtuous."  4 
Plato  has  the  same  doctrine:  cowards 
and  unjust  men  will  be  born  again  as 


6  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

women;  gluttons,  drunkards,  and  wan- 
tons become  asses;  the  violent  become 
wolves  or  hawks.5 

The  re-embodiment  of  souls,  thus  be- 
come retributive,  may  be  superimposed 
on  retribution  in  another  world,  a  sojourn 
in  heaven  or  hell  intervening  between 
two  successive  lives  on  earth.  This  com- 
bination was  made,  as  we  shall  see,  both 
\in  the  East  and  the  West. 

II 

In  India  and  among  the  Greeks  me- 
tempsychosis was  not  only  a  popular 
belief  and  a  religious  doctrine,  but  it  was 
taken  up  into  philosophy  and  meta- 
physics. An  exposition  of  these  classical 
systems  will  show  what  great  possibilities 
there  were  in  the  idea. 

In  the  older  Brahmanic  scriptures 
there  is  no  distinct  reference  to  metem- 
psychosis. The  hymns  of  the  Rig- Veda 
know  of  the  blessedness  of  the  good  in 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  7 

the  heaven  of  the  gods,  while  the  fate  of 
the  wicked  is  less  frequently  and  less 
explicitly  alluded  to  —  they  are  thrust 
down  to  "  that  deep  place,"  into  un- 
fathomable darkness.  Later  texts  are 
less  reticent;  in  the  torments  of  hell  the 
Indian  —  especially  the  sectarian  —  im- 
agination has  achieved  unsurpassed  hor- 
rors. 

In  the  Upanishads  the  re-embodiment 
of  the  soul  to  another  life  on  earth  is 
introduced  as  a  solemn  mystery.  The 
novelty  and  the  mystery  do  not  lie  in  the 
idea  itself,  which,  as  we  have  seen,  is  a 
common  savage  notion,  and  is  doubtless 
far  older  in  India  than  philosophical 
thinking,  but  in  the  law  of  reincarna- 
tion which  reflection  discovers.  In  pas- 
sages which  are  among  the  oldest  in  the 
Upanishads  and  the  most  profound,6  it 
is  not  merely  the  fortunes  of  men  that 
are  determined  by  their  previous  exist- 
ence, but  their  character.  When  Ya- 


8  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

jnavalkya  and  Artabhaga  go  out  alone 
to  talk  of  the  secret  that  fills  them  with 
awe,  "  their  discourse  was  of  deeds  (Kar- 
ma),7 and  what  they  praised  was  deeds; 
verily,  a  man  becomes  good  by  good 
deeds,  evil  by  evil."  In  another  conver- 
sation, after  speaking  of  the  transit  from 
one  life  to  another  in  the  world  of  men  or 
of  gods,  Ya jnavalkya  says:  "  As  a  man 
consists  of  this  or  that,  as  he  acts,  as  he 
lives,  so  will  he  be  born.  He  who  did 
what  was  good  will  be  born  as  a  good 
man;  he  who  did  evil,  as  a  bad  man.  Ho 
becomes  holy  by  holy  works,  wicked  by 
wicked.  Therefore  it  is  said,  '  Man  is 
altogether  fashioned  of  desire;  as  his 
desire  is,  so  is  his  insight;  as  his  insight, 
so  are  his  deeds;  according  to  his  deeds, 
so  is  his  destiny.'  "  8 

In  this  passage  —  in  which,  it  may  be 
noted,  only  human  births  are  contem- 
plated —  re-embodiment  appears  to  fol- 
low at  once  on  death: 9  "  As  the  cater- 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  9 

pillar,  when  it  has  reached  the  tip  of  a 
leaf,  lays  hold  of  another  and  draws  itself 
over  to  it,  so  the  soul,  after  it  has  cast  off 
the  body  and  [temporarily]  abandoned 
ignorance,  lays  hold  of  another  begin- 
ning and  draws  itself  over  to  it." 10  But 
the  belief  in  heaven  and  hell  was  already 
firmly  fixed,  and  in  the  general  concep- 
tion the  soul  at  death  goes  to  heaven  or 
hell  and  there  remains  until  its  merit  is 
exhausted  or  its  ill-desert  expiated, 
when  it  returns  to  earth  to  enter  a  new 
body. 

In  other  Upanishads,  as  in  Manu,  the 
principle  that  what  a  man  sows  in  one 
life  he  shall  reap  in  another  determines 
the  rank  and  condition  in  which  a  man 
is  born:  "  Those  who  here  lead  a  good 
life  may  look  forward  to  being  honor- 
ably born  of  a  Brahman  mother,  or  a 
Kshatriya,  or  a  Vaifya  (i.  e.,  in  one  of  the 
three  high  castes) ;  while  those  who  have 
led  a  vile  life  may  expect  to  enter  the 


io  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

womb  of  a  bitch,  or  a  sow,  or  a  Candala" 
(a  creature  having  the  semblance  of 
man,  but  in  reality  beneath  the  level  of 
an  unclean  beast).11 

Man's  destiny  is  not  solely  deter- 
mined by  his  conduct;  knowledge  also 
counts.  When  the  departed  soul  on  its 
way  comes  to  the  moon,  where  is  the 
entrance  to  the  heavenly  world,  it  is  ex- 
amined on  its  knowledge;  if  it  fails,  "  it 
is  rained  down  to  earth  to  be  born  again 
as  a  worm,  or  a  fly,  or  a  fish,  or  a  bird, 
as  a  lion,  a  boar,  a  tiger,  a  man,  or  some 
other  creature,  in  this  place  or  in  that 
—  each  according  to  his  works,  each  ac- 
cording to  his  knowledge."12 

The  lot  of  man  from  existence  to 
existence  is  thus  fixed  by  his  deeds,  his 
Karma.  It  is  not  appointed  for  him  in 
conformity  with  his  desert  by  the  sen- 
tence of  a  just  judge,  but  is  determined 
by  the  inexorable  law  of  cause  and  effect. 
Every  act,  every  thought,  has  its  inevi- 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  n 

table  consequence  in  this  life  or  another, 
and  that  consequence  may  in  its  turn 
become  a  cause.  All  that  men  have  else- 
where attributed  to  divine  justice  or 
inscrutable  providence,  to  fate  or  chance, 
is  in  India  the  fruit  of  the  deed.  To  this 
law,  which  is  the  causal  nexus  of  the 
universe  itself,  men  and  beasts,  gods  and 
demons,  are  alike  subject.  Good  deeds, 
no  less  than  evil,  have  their  consequences, 
and  equally  entail  another  existence. 
From  eternity  to  eternity  all  souls  are 
thus  bound  upon  a  revolving  wheel 
more  terrible  than  the  fate  of  Ixion  — 
the  round  of  rebirth. 

From  the  moment  when  this  idea  took 
possession  of  men's  minds,  the  problem 
of  philosophy  was  to  find  what  it  is  that 
holds  the  soul  fast  in  this  round,  and 
how  its  bonds  may  be  broken;  and  men 
began  to  demand  of  religion,  not  that  it 
should  get  from  the  gods  the  good  things 
of  this  life  and  the  promise  of  a  future 


12  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

abode  in  heaven,  but  that  it  should  as- 
sure them  of  deliverance  from  the  law  of 
transmigration. 

For  the  thinkers,  the  great  evil  was 
not  the  sufferings  of  the  mortal  life  and 
the  dread  of  death  in  endlessly  repeated 
existences.  The  loathing  of  life  which 
was  methodically  cultivated  in  Bud- 
dhism, for  example,  does  not  appear  in 
the  earlier  Upanishads,  nor  is  their 
tone  prevailingly  pessimistic.13  The  evil 
is  that  in  this  life  the  soul  is  estranged 
from  its  origin  and  its  true  destiny. 

For  the  soul,  the  true  self  of  man,  is 
not  a  part  of  what  we  call  "  nature," 
with  its  incessant  change;  it  is  of  an- 
other order  of  being,  essentially  eternal 
and  unchanging.  The  great  discovery  of 
the  Upanishads,  the  truth  of  which  the 
teachers  speak  with  bated  breath,  is  that 
the  soul  in  man  is  identical  with  the  All- 
Soul,  the  one  reality  in  the  universe,  the 
Absolute  of  which  naught  can  be  said 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  13 

save,  "It  is  not  this,  not  that."14  As  a 
modern  interpreter  expresses  it:  "  The 
Brahman,  the  power  which  presents  it- 
self to  us  embodied  in  all  beings,  which 
brings  into  existence  all  worlds,  supports 
and  maintains  them,  and  again  re- 
absorbs  them  into  itself  —  this  eternal, 
infinite,  divine  power  is  identical  with 
the  Atman,  with  what,  after  stripping 
off  all  that  is  external,  we  find  in  our- 
selves as  our  inmost  and  true  being,  our 
real  self,  the  soul."  The  pregnant  for- 
mula for  this  identity  is  found  in  the 
great  word,  "  That  art  thou!  " 

Ignorance  of  this  unity  and  identity  — 
an  ignorance  which  is  not  negative  but 
positive,  a  false  knowledge  —  is  the 
fons  et  origo  malorum;  it  is  this  ignorance 
that  binds  man  to  the  wheel  of  rebirth. 
In  the  transcendental  knowledge  of  iden- 
tity is  dispelled  the  illusion  of  finite 
individuality,  and  with  it  the  might  of 
"  Deed  "  is  destroyed,  the  soul  is  forever 


14  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

set  free — "It  cometh  not  again. ' '  Nor  is 
it  only  after  death  that  this  eternal  life 
begins:  "  He  who  is  without  desire,  free 
from  desire,  his  desire  attained,  whose 
desire  is  set  on  Self  (Atman),  his  vital 
breath  does  not  pass  out,  but  Brahman 
he  is,  and  in  Brahman  he  is  absorbed. 
As  the  verse  says, 

'  When  all  the  passion  is  at  rest 
That  lurks  within  the  heart  of  man, 
Then  is  the  mortal  no  more  mortal, 
But  here  and  now  attaineth  Brahman/ 

As  a  serpent's  skin,  dead  and  cast  off, 
lies  on  an  ant  hill,  so  lies  this  body  then; 
but  the  bodiless,  the  immortal,  the  life  is 
pure  Brahman,  is  pure  light."15 

When  this  monism  is  consistently 
thought  through  in  the  classical  Vedanta, 
what  we  call  the  phenomenal  world  is  as 
unreal  as  the  empirical  Ego;  both  are 
projections  of  the  cosmic  illusion,  Maya. 
In  other  schools  the  philosophy  takes  a 
more  pantheistic  turn,  with  the  exist- 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  15 

ence  of  individual  souls  in  God;  and 
it  finally  accommodates  itself  to  Hindu 
theism,  in  which  the  grace  of  God  de- 
livers from  the  round  of  rebirth  those 
who  turn  to  him  in  faith  and  love,  and 
takes  them  to  be  forever  with  him. 

The  dualistic  system  of  the  Sankhya 
likewise  culminates  in  a  philosophy  of 
salvation.  Here  too  the  way  is  knowl- 
edge —  knowledge  that  the  true  self  is 
not  what  men  think,  whether  they 
identify  it  with  the  body  or  self-con- 
scious mind,  but  a  transcendental  Ego, 
essentially  inactive  and  impassive,  un- 
touched by  all  the  changes  of  its  environ- 
ment. Sensation,  intellection,  volition, 
together  with  the  self-consciousness  which 
refers  these  to  an  Ego,  are  not  functions 
of  the  soul,  but  operations  of  that  matter, 
instinct  with  productive  and  destructive 
energies,  which  is  the  seat  and  source  of 
all  change.  When  the  illusion  is  dispelled 
by  which  the  soul  is  conceived  to  be  actor 


16  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

or  sufferer  in  the  drama  of  existence, 
it  is  set  free  not  only  from  gross  embod- 
iment but  from  the  subtle  material 
apparatus  of  sense  and  consciousness, 
and  abides  forever  an  unconcerned 
spectator  of  a  play  it  does  not  see  —  a 
monad  Absolute. 

The  Yoga,  with  its  physiological  and 
psychological  methods,  has  the  same 
end,  the  emancipation  of  the  soul  from 
the  bondage  of  rebirth,  which  is  the 
greatest  imaginable  evil.  Ascetics  of 
every  type  —  Sannyasins,  Yogins,  Sa- 
dhus  —  seek  this  deliverance  in  their 
several  fashions.  Jainism  and  Bud- 
dhism, rejecting  the  authority  of  the 
Vedas  and  the  pretensions  of  the  Brah- 
mans,  painted  in  still  darker  colors  the 
misery  of  mortal  life,  and  preached 
salvation  by  the  suppression  of  the 
activity  of  the  soul  or  by  the  extinction 
of  desire  —  the  will  to  be.  Primitive 
Buddhism,  indeed,  denied  the  perma- 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  17 

nence  of  the  Ego,  and  therefore  knew  no 
transmigration  of  souls,  because  in  that 
sense  there  was  no  soul  to  migrate  from 
body  to  body;  but  it  claimed  as  its  great 
discovery  the  "  chain  of  causation " 
which  entails  rebirth,  and  to  the  ordi- 
nary mind,  incapable  of  the  psychologi- 
cal subtleties  of  anegoism,  the  difference 
from  the  common  belief  in  metem- 
psychosis was  probably  more  in  words 
than  in  conception. 

The  goal  is  Nirvana.  In  different 
schools  in  the  course  of  the  centuries 
Nirvana  has  had  many  meanings;  to 
some  it  signified  the  extinction  of  the 
desire  which  gives  the  deed  its  deadly 
power,  and  the  great  release  from  mortal 
existence;16  some  conceived  it  positively 
as  the  supreme  good,  the  transcendent 
intelligence  which  is  the  essence  of  a 
Buddha,  or  as  absolute  Being.  But  al- 
ways it  has  been  the  end  of  the  round  of 
rebirth. 


1 8  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

The  missionary  expansion  of  Bud- 
dhism carried  the  Indian  doctrine  of  an 
endless  series  of  mortal  lives  under  the 
law  of  Karma  —  the  inevitable  conse- 
quence of  the  deed  done  —  to  Tibet  and 
China,  to  Corea  and  Japan,  as  well  as  to 
Ceylon  and  Farther  India;  while  along 
the  routes  of  commerce  Hinduism 
reached  far  into  the  Malayan  lands 
where  Hindu  influence  has  now  been 
superseded  by  Moslem.  The  belief  in 
rebirth  in  some  form  or  other  pervades 
all  Eastern  Asia. 

In  the  Great  Vehicle  (Mahayana) 
school  of  Buddhism,  which  gained 
predominance  in  China  and  Japan,  re- 
embodiment  has  acquired  another  signi- 
ficance. While  the  old-fashioned  saint 
sought  only  to  achieve  his  own  salvation 
and  enter  at  death  into  the  Nirvana 
from  which  there  is  no  return,  the  Bo- 
dhisattva  aspired  in  some  future  age  to 
become  a  Buddha  and  a  saviour  of  the 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  19 

world,  and  therefore  voluntarily  re- 
mained in  the  round  of  rebirth  when  he 
might  have  escaped  from  it  and  entered 
into  his  rest.  In  his  long  succession  of 
embodiments,  from  the  time  he  first  con- 
ceived the  great  purpose,  he  is  cultivat- 
ing the  perfections  which  a  Buddha 
must  possess,  carrying  over  what  he  has 
achieved  in  one  existence  as  a  diathesis 
of  character  into  another,  until  the 
consummation. 

The  identity  of  the  individual  Bodhi- 
sattva  in  all  these  lives  is  assumed;  for 
the  original  purpose,  or  vow,  runs 
through  them  all  and  gives  unity  to  the 
endeavor,  and  the  results  of  these  en- 
deavors are  preserved  and  transmitted 
from  life  to  life;  and  although  even  here 
Buddhist  psychology  does  not  allow  us 
to  speak  of  an  individual  soul,17  founding 
its  refusal  on  the  metaphysics  of  unre- 
ality, the  less  subtle  Western  mind  can 
find  no  more  appropriate  name  for  it. 


20  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

Metempsychosis  —  using  the  term  with 
the  same  qualification  —  here  becomes 
a  way  by  which  man  may  progress  from 
life  to  life  till  he  attains  perfect  intelli- 
gence and  a  perfection  of  character  in 
which  he  is  not  only  free  from  all  selfish 
desires  and  aims,  but  is  filled  with  pure 
compassion  and  benevolence.  Then,  out 
of  love  to  all  beings  and  desire  for  their 
salvation,  he  becomes  incarnate  as  the 
Buddha  of  the  age,  and  reveals  the  way 
of  life. 

Herein  the  Bodhisattva  has  a  great 
exemplar  in  Sakyamuni,  whose  experi- 
ences in  many  forms  of  existence  before 
he  became  Buddha  were  narrated  in  the 
Jataka-book,  and  formed  the  favorite 
subjects  of  Buddhist  art.  Other  Bud- 
dhas,  like  Amitabha,  had  trodden  the 
same  path  to  the  same  end. 

The  conception  of  the  progressive 
development  of  character  to  perfection 
through  many  rebirths  is  common,  as  we 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  21 

shall  see,  in  modern  Western  forms  of  the 
belief;  but  in  the  East  it  is  peculiar  to 
Mahayana  Buddhism.  And  while  in  the 
West  the  perfection  of  the  individual  is 
the  end  in  itself,  in  Buddhism  it  is  a 
means  to  a  greater  end  —  the  salvation 
of  all  sentient  beings. 

This  rapid  survey  would  be  incom- 
plete without  at  least  a  mention  of  the 
Chinese  thinker  Chuang-tzse,  to  whose 
philosophy  "  we  are  such  stuff  as 
dreams  are  made  of,"  and  who  conceives 
metempsychosis  accordingly.  In  an 
often  quoted  passage  he  writes : 

"  Once  upon  a  time  I  dreamt  I  was  a  but- 
terfly, fluttering  hither  and  thither.  ...  I  was 
conscious  only  of  following  my  fancies  as  a 
butterfly,  and  was  unconscious  of  my  individu- 
ality as  a  man.  Suddenly,  I  awaked,  and  there 
I  lay,  myself  again.  Now  I  do  not  know 
whether  I  was  then  a  man  dreaming  I  was  a 
butterfly,  or  whether  I  am  now  a  butterfly 
dreaming  I  am  a  man.  Between  a  man  and  a 
butterfly  there  is  necessarily  a  barrier.  The 
transition  is  called  metempsychosis."  18 


22  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

Chuang-tzse  wrote  in  the  latter  part 
of  the  fourth  and  the  first  quarter  of  the 
third  century  B.C.  In  his  time  Bud- 
dhism had  not  yet  been  introduced  into 
China,19  and  it  is  very  improbable  that 
Chuang-tzsfe  had  any  knowledge  of  its 
doctrines.  Influence  of  Indian  philos- 
ophy upon  the  Taoism  of  Lao-tzse  and 
his  successors  has  been  conjectured,  but 
without  sufficient  reason.  So  far  as 
Chuang-tzsS  is  concerned,  his  playful 
treatment  of  the  subject  is  far  removed 
from  the  Indian  seriousness,  and  of  the 
deterministic  idea  of  Karma  there  is  no 
suggestion.  Popular  Chinese  beliefs  and 
the  principles  of  his  own  philosophy  are 
quite  adequate  to  account  for  Chuang- 
tzse's  fancy. 

Ill 

The  Greeks  had  all  the  common  varie- 
ties of  belief  about  the  whereabouts  of 
the  departed.  Ghosts  troubled  them  as 
much  as  other  people;  piety  and  appre- 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  23 

hension  conspired  to  build  tombs  for 
the  dwellings  of  the  dead  and  to  provide 
for  their  wants;  the  Homeric  Hades 
was  a  vast  cavernous  nether-world 
like  the  Hebrew  Sheol,  among  whose 
pallid  shades  a  later  hand  painted  in 
the  torments  of  Tityos  and  Sisyphos 
and  Tantalos  —  the  beginnings  of  hell.20 
Polygnotos  depicted  for  the  edification  of 
worshippers  at  Delphi  the  punishment 
of  the  Danaidae.  Plato  and  Plutarch, 
Aristophanes  and  Lucian,  in  their  dif- 
ferent ways  let  us  look  into  the  Greek 
inferno,  and  we  can  follow  the  tradition 
through  such  writings  as  the  Apoc- 
alypse of  Peter  into  the  vision  literature 
of  the  Middle  Ages  and  the  Divina 
Commedia  of  Dante. 

The  oldest  conception  of  retribution 
doubtless  was  that  the  Erinys,  the 
vengeful  Fury,  pursued  the  guilty  beyond 
the  tomb ;  but  the  idea  of  a  judgment  of 
the  dead  early  appears.  Thus  Pindar: 


24  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

"  At  death,  forthwith,  the  helpless  souls 
receive  their  retribution,  and  deeds  done 
in  this  realm  of  Zeus  are  judged  beneath 
the  earth  by  one  who  gives  sentence 
with  dire  necessity."  The  poet  goes  on 
to  picture  the  abode  of  the  blest  in  their 
subterranean  world  where  the  sun 
shines  by  night  as  brilliant  as  by  day, 
and  the  toil-free  and  tearless  life  of  the 
good  there  in  company  with  the  most 
honored  gods;  while  the  others  endure  a 
misery  men  cannot  bear  to  look  upon.21 
The  Orphic  religion,  which,  from  the 
sixth  century  on,  spread  widely  in  Greece 
and  had  great  influence,  dwelt  with 
evangelistic  zeal  on  the  misery  of  the 
unsanctified  in  hell;  much  of  the  fami- 
liar imagery  of  later  representations  can 
be  traced  to  this  source.  It  was,  indeed, 
as  a  way  of  salvation  from  this  misery 
that  the  new  religion  offered  itself,  with 
its  initiations  and  purifications,  its 
orgies  and  enthusiasms.  Through  the 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  25 

same  Orphic  channels,  probably,  the 
idea  of  metempsychosis,  at  least  in  a 
religious  connection,  was  introduced 
into  Greece.  The  view  of  the  Greeks 
themselves,  that  Pythagoras,  with  whose 
name  the  belief  is  peculiarly  associated, 
appropriated  the  doctrine  from  the 
Egyptians 22  must  be  rejected;  for  among 
the  many  and  confused  notions  of  the 
ancient  Egyptians  about  the  hereafter, 
the  transmigration  of  souls  does  not 
figure.  The  premises  of  the  Greek  con- 
ception are  not  to  be  sought  in  the  mys- 
terious philosophy  of  Egyptian  priests, 
but  in  a  rude  popular  psychology  which 
does  not  have  to  be  borrowed.  The 
belief,  it  may  be  observed,  is  expressly 
attributed  to  the  Thracian  Getae,  and 
may  well  have  been  general  among  the 
Thracians  from  whom  the  Dionysiac- 
Orphic  religions  spread  into  Greece. 

The  starting  point  is  religious,  not 
metaphysical.      The   soul  is  a  fallen 


26  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

divinity  (daimon),  for  its  fault  embodied 
upon  earth  and  subject  here  to  physical 
and  moral  defilement.  The  body  is 
the  tomb  of  the  soul,  or  its  prison- 
house,  or  its  transient  habitation,  its 
tabernacle,  or  its  vesture  of  flesh,  its 
filthy  garment  —  all  these  figures,  so 
familiar  in  Christian  literature,  are 
Greek  commonplaces. 

From  this  bondage  the  soul  is  freed  by 
death  only  to  pass  into  another  body 
of  man,  or  beast,  or  plant.  Pythagoras 
taught  that  the  soul,  entering  the  round 
of  necessity,  is  bound  now  in  one  kind  of 
living  creatures,  now  in  another;23  and 
Empedocles  says  of  himself:  "  I  was  erst- 
while a  boy,  a  girl,  a  shrub,  a  bird,  a 
speechless  fish  in  the  sea."24  Later,  when 
psychology  discovered  a  difference  of 
kind  between  men's  souls  and  brutes — 
not  to  speak  of  shrubs — the  soul's  mi- 
grations were  confined  by  some  to  the 
human  genus,  though  Plato  still  holds 
the  older  opinion. 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  27 

Rebirth,  as  well  as  the  first  embodi- 
ment, was  expiatory.  Pindar  speaks 
only  vaguely  of  the  "  ancient  guilt/'  but 
Empedocles  is  more  explicit:  "  There  is 
an  oracle  of  Necessity,  an  ancient  decree 
of  the  gods,  eternal,  sealed  with  broad 
oaths,  that  when  one  of  the  divine 
beings  (daL^oves)  who  have  endless  life  as 
their  lot  criminally  defiles  his  hands  by 
bloodshed,  or  when  one,  in  the  train  of 
Strife,  swears  a  false  oath,  he  must  wan- 
der thrice  ten  thousand  seasons  far  from 
the  blessed,  being  born  through  all  that 
time  in  all  manner  of  forms  of  mortal 
creatures,  exchanging  one  grievous  path 
of  life  for  another." 25 

In  Greece,  as  in  India,  the  belief  in 
metempsychosis  was  early  combined 
with  the  established  notion  of  retribu- 
tion after  death.  From  their  punish- 
ment in  the  nether-world  for  deeds  done 
in  the  body  or  from  their  reward  in  the 
abode  of  the  blest,  souls  are  sent  back  to 


28  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

earth  to  enter  other  bodies,  returning  at 
death  again  to  Hades  —  thus  the  round 
goes  on. 

It  is  not,  however,  as  in  India,  an 
endless  round.  The  guilt  of  the  fall  is 
expiated  by  the  soul's  banishment,26  and 
by  the  sufferings  it  undergoes  in  this 
mortal  life  and  beneath  the  earth  its 
defilement  is  purged;  when  this  has 
been  accomplished,  the  soul  is  delivered 
from  mortality  and  returns  to  its  original 
estate.  The  souls  whose  expiation  of  the 
ancient  guilt  Persephone  accepts  as 
sufficient,  she  sends  back  to  the  light  of 
the  sun  in  the  ninth  year  (after  their 
descent  to  Hades);  of  such  are  born 
illustrious  kings,  and  men  excelling  in 
might,  and  eminent  in  wisdom.  There- 
after they  are  worshipped  as  heroes.27 

It  was  an  early  and  persistent  feature 
of  the  doctrine  that  the  expiation  was 
completed  in  a  certain  cycle  of  rebirths 
recurring  at  fixed  intervals  of  time.  In 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  29 

Pindar,  those  who  thrice,  in  both  states 
(i.e.  in  the  earthly  life  and  in  Hades),  have 
persevered  to  keep  the  soul  wholly  free 
from  evils  traverse  the  way  of  Zeus  to  the 
towers  of  Kronos,  the  island  of  the  blest, 
whose  delights  are  poetically  described.28 
The  common  belief  was  that  a  sojourn  of 
a  thousand  years  in  the  abodes  of  the 
blessed  or  the  dismal  realm  of  Hades  in- 
tervened between  the  successive  earthly 
embodiments  of  the  soul,  and  that  the 
whole  cycle  comprised  ten  such  returns, 
so  that,  in  normal  course,  the  soul 
could  attain  final  release  and  restoration 
of  its  divinity  only  after  a  lapse  of  more 
than  ten  thousand  years.29  This  scheme, 
which  we  shall  find  again  in  Plato,  is 
probably  Pythagorean. 

The  guilt  which  was  to  be  expiated 
was,  as  in  ancient  religions  generally, 
conceived  as  defilement,  and  demanded 
physical  or  magical  purifications.  Such 
purifications  formed  an  important  part 


30  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

in  the  ritual  of  the  Orphic  and  Pythag- 
orean sects;  Empedocles  was  a  famous 
expert  in  the  art. 

In  the  body,  the  soul  is  ever  beset  by 
the  temptations  of  sense  and  exposed  to 
pollution  by  contact  with  things  unclean. 
Worse  still,  it  is  in  danger  of  forgetting 
its  origin  and  destiny,  and  thus,  with  no 
effort  to  escape  the  round  of  death  and 
birth,  contracting  fresh  guilt  in  every 
existence,  may  go  on  endlessly.  The 
task  of  religion  and  of  philosophy  is  to 
awake  in  man  the  consciousness  of  his 
true  divine  nature,  to  arouse  him  to  a 
sense  of  his  misery  and  peril,  and  to  show 
him  what  he  must  do  to  be  saved. 

The  way  is  the  religious,  or,  as  they 
called  it,  the  philosophic,  life,  a  regimen 
by  which  the  accumulation  of  guilt  and 
defilement  was  guarded  against  and  un- 
cleanness  purged.  Since  the  greatest  sin 
is  the  taking  of  life,  it  was  forbidden  to 
eat  flesh,  or  to  offer  bloody  sacrifices  to 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  31 

the  gods;30  wine,  also,  was  generally  pro- 
scribed; and  there  were  many  other 
taboos,  such  as  the  famous  rule  against 
beans.  For  the  better  observance  of 
this  mode  of  life,  Pythagoras  founded  in 
southern  Italy  a  religious  order,  which 
for  a  time  flourished  greatly.  Similar 
abstinences  were  practised  by  the  Orphic 
sects  and  other  seekers  of  salvation.  To 
this  bodily  discipline  the  Pythagoreans 
added  the  purification  of  the  soul  by 
philosophy,  but  wherein  this  consisted  is 
beyond  our  knowledge. 

Thus  far  the  conception  of  metem- 
psychosis had  been  that  the  soul,  a 
divine  being,  had  been  banished  to  earth 
for  an  "  ancient  guilt,"  a  mythical  fall, 
and  condemned  to  alternating  sojourns 
in  mortal  bodies  and  in  Hades;  and  that 
its  release  came  by  expiation  and  purifi- 
cation through  a  long  period. 

For  Plato  also  the  soul  is  here  below 
in  consequence  of  a  fall;  but  it  is  the  fall 


32  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

of  the  soul  itself  rather  than  the  trans- 
gression of  an  eternal  statute  of  the  gods. 
In  the  myth  of  the  charioteer  and  his  pair 
of  winged  steeds  in  the  Phaedrus,31  the 
disaster  comes  from  the  driver's  inability 
to  control  the  unruly  beast  —  that  is,  the 
failure  of  the  intellectual  element  in  the 
soul  to  master  its  lower  desires.  Plung- 
ing madly  downward,  the  brute  drags 
the  soul,  with  broken  wings,  to  earth, 
where  it  enters  a  human  body,32  it  may  be 
of  one  who  becomes  a  philosopher,  or  of 
some  lower  kind  of  man,  according  to  the 
measure  of  the  vision  of  truth  it  had 
caught  there  above.  At  death,  the  souls 
go  to  judgment,  and  are  sent  to  places 
of  punishment  beneath  the  earth,  or  are 
borne  aloft  to  a  region  in  the  heavens, 
their  destiny  corresponding  to  the  life 
they  lived  among  men. 

In  the  thousandth  year,  the  souls  from 
above  and  below  come  to  draw  lots  and 
elect  the  life  on  which  they  are  about 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  33 

to  enter.  A  soul  that  was  once  a  man's 
may  now  by  its  own  choice  pass  into 
a  beast,  and  one  that  was  before  in  a 
beast  may  enter  the  body  of  a  man. 
Ten  thousand  years  must  pass  in  these 
vicissitudes  before  the  soul  that  has 
lost  its  wings  can  have  them  restored. 
Only  the  soul  that  has  sincerely  pursued 
philosophy  and  in  three  successive  mil- 
leniums  has  made  the  election  of  the 
philosophic  life  recovers  its  wings  in  the 
third  thousandth  year,  and  mounts  up 
to  the  world  above  whence  it  came.33 

The  same  conceptions  recur  in  the 
most  extended  of  Plato's  presentations 
of  the  state  after  death,  the  myth  of  Er 
the  Pamphylian  at  the  end  of  the  Re- 
public. For  every  wrong  men  do  to  any 
one  they  suffer  ten-fold  —  a  thousand 
years,  ten  times  the  span  of  human  life. 
Especial  emphasis  is  here  laid  on  the 
freedom  of  the  soul  in  choosing  its  life. 
On  the  eve  of  its  return  to  earth,  each 


34  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

soul  elects  the  kind  of  life  it  wishes  to 
live,  after  solemn  warning  of  the  respon- 
sibility of  the  choice:  "  The  word  of 
Lachesis,  daughter  of  Necessity!  Short- 
lived souls,  this  is  the  beginning  of  a  new 
cycle  of  mortal  life  and  death;  your 
genius  will  not  pick  you  out,  but  you 
will  choose  your  genius  .  .  .  Virtue  is 
free  to  all,  and  as  a  man  honors  or  dis- 
esteems  it,  he  will  have  more  or  less  of  it. 
The  fault  is  the  chooser's;  God  is  blame- 
less." Having  made  their  choices  in  the 
memory  of  their  former  life,  the  souls 
drink  the  water  of  forgetfulness,  and, 
attended  by  their  genii  (daimones),  as- 
cend to  earth. 

The  eschatology  of  Plato  is  thus  a 
combination  of  metempsychosis  with 
retribution  in  heaven  or  hell.34  All  the 
elements  of  this  eschatology  are  found  in 
authors  much  older  than  Plato,  and  it  is 
well  established  that  the  doctrine  origi- 
nated and  was  systematized  in  Orphic- 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  35 

Pythagorean  sects  or  schools,  from  whom 
Plato  appropriated  it. 

But  under  all  the  similarity  of  Plato's 
teachings  to  those  of  his  predecessors, 
lies  a  different  conception  of  the  nature 
of  the  soul,  of  its  ruin  and  its  restoration. 
For  Plato  the  soul  is  an  immaterial  intelli- 
gence, and  thus  essentially  divine;  its 
fall  is  the  consequence  of  an  imperfect 
vision  of  the  eternal  truth  and  beauty; 
its  purification  is  not  by  magical  medi- 
cine and  dietary  laws,  but  the  clarifica- 
tion of  the  intelligence  by  philosophy. 

So  far  as  the  obscuration  is  moral,  the 
catharsis  is  moral;  not  only  the  truth, 
but  temperance  and  justice  and  courage 
and  sound  sense  are  means  of  purification. 
Above  all,  the  soul,  rising  superior  to  the 
deceptions  of  the  senses  and  the  seduc- 
tions of  the  appetites,  emancipating 
itself  from  the  body,  must  collect  itself, 
and,  so  far  as  it  can,  now  and  hereafter, 
live  by  itself.35  This  liberation  makes 


36  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

man,  even  on  earth,  immortal  and  divine. 
His  flight  from  the  world  is  the  putting 
on  of  the  likeness  of  God;  and  when 
such  a  one  is  finally  released  from  mortal 
existence,  the  pure  soul  ascends  to  be 
forever  with  God. 

Plato  thus  took  up  into  his  idealistic 
philosophy  the  conceptions  of  the  origin 
and  destiny  of  the  soul  which  came  ulti- 
mately from  the  mystery  religions,  and 
in  so  doing  purified  and  transfigured 
them.  His  successors  rejected  them  alto- 
gether. Aristotle's  psychology  made  the 
"  active  intellect  "  essentially  eternal, 
but  admitted  no  individual  existence 
after  death;  the  skepticism  of  the  Mid- 
dle Academy  brought  the  immortality  of 
the  soul  into  doubt  in  Plato's  own 
school;  the  Epicureans  took  it  for  their 
mission  to  free  men  from  the  fear  of 
death  and  hell  by  the  knowledge  that  the 
soul  is  dissolved  with  the  body;  the 
older  Stoics  in  general  held  that  the  in- 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  37 

dividual  soul  survived  till  the  next 
universal  conflagration,  but  not  that  it 
migrated  into  other  bodies;  some  of  the 
teachers  of  Middle  Stoa  —  notably,  Pan- 
aetius  —  taught  that  the  soul  was  gener- 
ated with  the  body  and  perished  with  it. 

In  the  first  century  before  Christ,  how- 
ever, in  the  general  revival  of  religious 
philosophy,  there  was  a  revival  of  the 
doctrine  of  metempsychosis  in  more  than 
one  school  (Pythagoreans,  Sextians),  and 
in  the  eclectic  or  syncretistic  popular 
philosophies  and  theologies  of  the  suc- 
ceeding period  metempsychosis  is  a  com- 
mon belief. 

It  is  found,  for  instance,  in  the  so- 
called  Hermes  Trismegistos,  with  the 
old  controversy  whether  a  human  soul 
can  ever  be  degraded  to  existence  in  the 
body  of  a  beast.  The  soul  (Nous,  or 
Logos)  is  of  the  same  nature  with  God; 
its  descent  to  the  earthly  sphere  and 
incarceration  in  a  mortal  body  is  brought 


38  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

into  connection  with  a  mythical  cosmog- 
ony; its  transmigrations,  its  salvation 
by  transcendental  knowledge  (^coo-is), 
and  the  upward  way  by  which  it  attains 
to  godhead  and  immortality,  are  the 
proper  subject  of  these  curious  scriptures. 
Many  Gnostic  sects  which  figure  in  the 
catalogues  of  Christian  heresies  also 
held  to  metempsychosis.36 

The  doctrine  attained  its  final  form  in 
ancient  philosophy  in  the  Neoplatonic 
system  of  Plotinus.  The  mythical  vesture 
-  especially  the  infernal  features  —  is 
here  stripped  off,  and  the  theory  is  pre- 
sented in  the  context  of  a  transcendental 
psychology  and  as  an  integral  part  of  an 
imposing  metaphysical  construction  of 
the  universe. 

The  soul  is  by  nature  divine,  of  the 
same  essence  with  deity; 37  its  fall  is  its 
desire  to  be  something  for  itself,  through 
which  it  forgets  its  father,  God,  and  its 
own  true  nature;  rejoicing  in  the  exer- 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  39 

cise  of  its  free-will,  it  strays  so  far  that  it 
loses  the  consciousness  of  its  origin,  "  as 
children  early  torn  from  their  parents 
and  brought  up  for  a  long  time  away 
from  them  do  not  know  either  who  they 
are  or  who  their  parents  were."38  The 
double  error  of  the  soul  is  overvaluing 
earthly  things  and  disprizing  itself. 
But  if  it  can  be  brought  to  see  the  worth- 
lessness  of  the  things  it  esteems  above 
itself,  and  to  recognize  its  origin  and 
worth,  it  has  in  itself  the  power  of  re- 
covery. For,  as  Plotinus  expresses  it, 
"  our  soul  did  not  wholly  descend  into 
the  world  of  sense,  but  somewhat  of  it 
ever  abides  in  the  intelligible  world/' 39 
To  that  world  it  may  mount  up  again, 
and  dispelling  the  illusion  of  the  sepa- 
rate self -consciousness,  "  ceasing  to  draw 
a  line  around  itself  to  divide  itself  from 
universal  reality,  will  come  to  the  abso- 
lute whole,  not  by  advancing  some- 
whither, but  by  abiding  in  that  whereon 
the  whole  is  based."  40 


40  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

But  there  are  heights  above  even  the 
unity  of  intelligence;  above  the  vision 
of  an  intelligence  that  is  master  of  its 
faculties  there  is  the  intuition  of  an  in- 
telligence in  love.  Bereft  of  its  faculties 
by  the  intoxication  of  the  nectar,  "  it  is 
reduced  by  love  to  that  simple  unity  of 
being  which  is  the  perfect  satisfaction 
of  our  souls. " 41  Of  this  final  state  of 
blessedness  the  soul  has  a  foretaste  and 
earnest  here  in  moments  of  ecstasy. 

In  their  descent  from  the  intelligible 
world,  the  souls  come  first  to  the  heavens, 
and  there  assume  a  body,  through  which 
they  pass  into  more  earthy  bodies  the 
farther  they  proceed  in  this  downward 
way,  and  from  one  body  into  another, 
these  incarnations  being  retributive;  a 
hard  master,  for  example,  being  born 
to  be  a  slave,  one  who  misused  wealth 
born  to  poverty,  and  so  on.42  In  com- 
passion with  the  souls  suffering  such 
hardships,  Zeus  made  their  bonds  (the 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  41 

body)  mortal,  and  gave  them  a  respite  at 
intervals,  that  they  might  be  free  from 
the  body,  and  become  themselves,  and 
dwell  where  the  soul  of  the  universe  ever 
abides,  subject  to  no  such  vicissitudes.43 

We  have  seen  how  the  soul  may  reas- 
cend  to  its  source;  but  there  is  also  a 
downward  way,  in  which  the  soul  may 
lose  the  dim  consciousness  of  its  origin 
which  man  retains,  and  thus  sink  to  the 
level  of  the  irrational  animals  or  even 
to  the  purely  vegetative  life  of  plants.44 

The  influence  of  Plotinus  was  very 
great  not  only  in  the  Neoplatonic 
school  but  upon  Christian  theology,  and 
he  is  the  fountain  head  of  the  higher 
Christian  mysticism.  The  Bible  of  the 
mediaeval  mystics,  Dionysius  Areopa- 
gita,45  is  thoroughly  Plotinian;  the  ascent 
of  the  soul  to  God  and  its  union  with 
God  through  love  —  the  goal  and  the 
way  —  are  the  same.  But  the  trans- 
migration of  souls,  which  was  not  an 


42  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

essential  part  of  the  Neoplatonic  system 
and  was,  moreover,  at  variance  with  the 
doctrine  of  the  Church,  was  tacitly  let 
fall. 

The  development  of  the  idea  of  met- 
empsychosis in  India  and  among  the 
Greeks  is  in  many  respects  similar. 
Thus,  to  indicate  only  salient  points  of 
comparison,  in  Plotinus,  as  in  the  Ve- 
danta,  the  soul  is  in  essence  one  with  the 
Absolute,  from  which  it  is  estranged  by 
ignorance  at  once  of  the  Absolute  and  of 
its  own  true  nature.  Alienated  thus  by  a 
separating  self-consciousness  from  its 
real  self,  the  soul  is  invested  with  a  body, 
and  passes  from  body  to  body  of  man  or 
beast  as  its  character  determines  from 
existence  to  existence.  From  this  condi- 
tion it  can  be  delivered  only  by  true  self- 
knowledge.  The  illusion  of  the  separate 
consciousness  is  thus  dispelled,  and  in 
sublime  intuition  the  soul  realizes  its 
oneness  with  the  universal  intelligence 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  43 

and  universal  being,  and  with  the 
Absolute  which  is  beyond  knowing  and 
being. 

These  fundamental  agreements,  to 
which  many  resemblances  in  particulars 
might  be  added,  naturally  prompt  the 
inquiry  whether  they  are  the  outcome  of 
an  independent  parallel  development,  or 
whether  the  idea  of  transmigration  in 
Greek  religions  and  philosophies  is 
derived  from  India,  or  at  least  influenced 
in  its  higher  development  by  Indian 
thought. 

Many  scholars  are  convinced  that  the 
belief  in  metempsychosis  was  received  by 
the  Greeks  from  India; 46  and  some  go  so 
far  as  to  attribute  the  introduction  of 
the  doctrine  to  Pythagoras,  whose  travels 
in  search  of  wisdom  are  for  this  purpose 
extended  to  India.47  The  question  is  but 
a  part  of  a  larger  problem,  the  influence 
of  India  on  the  West,  which  lies  quite 
beyond  the  scope  of  our  inquiry.  It 


44  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

must  suffice  here  to  adduce  briefly  cer- 
tain considerations  bearing  on  the  partic- 
ular subject  before  us. 

It  may  be  said,  to  begin  with,  that 
there  is  no  indication  that  the  Greeks  in 
any  age  entertained  a  suspicion  that  the 
doctrine  of  transmigration  was  derived 
from  India,  or,  indeed,  that  they  had  any 
philosophical  debts  in  that  quarter. 
Further,  the  doctrine  appears  to  have 
been  well  known  in  the  sixth  century, 
and  to  have  been  especially  current  in 
Sicily  and  southern  Italy,  while  all  that 
we  know  of  communication  in  that  age 
makes  it  improbable  that  the  Greeks  had 
such  a  knowledge  of  Indian  thought  as 
the  hypothesis  implies  prior  to  the  con- 
solidation of  the  Persian  empire  under 
Darius  and  the  end  of  the  Persian  wars. 

Of  greater  weight  than  these  antece- 
dent probabilities  are  the  far-reaching 
differences  between  the  Greek  and  Indian 
conceptions  of  metempsychosis.  The 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  45 

Indian  conception  is  inseparable  from 
the  doctrine  of  Karma,48  to  which  there 
is  no  parallel  among  the  Greeks.49  On  the 
other  hand,  the  characteristic  Greek 
notions  of  a  fall  of  the  soul  in  time  by 
an  act  of  free-will,  and  of  the  expiation 
of  this  original  sin  and  of  the  actual 
transgressions  of  earthly  lives  by  a 
limited  series  of  rebirths  in  a  period  of 
ten  thousand  years,  are  not  only  foreign 
to  Indian  thought  of  every  school  but 
radically  at  variance  with  it.50  What 
remains  is  the  bare  belief  in  transmigra- 
tion (which,  as  we  have  seen,  is  a  com- 
mon piece  of  savage  soul-lore),  and  the 
moral  development  of  it  (also  common) , 
according  to  which  man's  estate  and  for- 
tune in  the  mortal  embodiment  are  pre- 
determined by  former  deeds. 

In  Plato,  metempsychosis  is  most 
clearly,  even  to  its  mythical  form, 
adopted  from  the  Greek  mystery  reli- 
gions and  religious  philosophies.  What 


46  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

raises  it  above  the  level  of  the  vulgar 
beliefs  is  the  mind  of  Plato  himself,  his 
own  higher  theology  and  anthropology, 
whose  antecedents  again  are  well  known, 
and  are  genuinely  Greek. 

And  now,  coming  back  to  Plotinus,  in 
whom  we  found  such  striking  resem- 
blance to  the  Vedanta,  it  must  be  said 
that  in  his  time,  as,  indeed,  ever  since  the 
conquests  of  Alexander,  communication 
between  the  West  and  the  East  was 
such  that  knowledge  of  Indian  religions 
and  philosophies  might  very  well  have 
reached  a  great  commercial  and  literary 
centre  such  as  Alexandria.  How  much 
was  actually  known  of  them  is  another 
question;  so  far  as  can  be  judged  from 
what  remains  to  us,  it  was  surprisingly 
little.  Concerning  Plotinus  himself,  the 
testimony  of  his  disciple  Porphyry  is, 
that,  after  attaining  proficiency  in  Greek 
philosophy,  he  desired  to  acquaint  him- 
self with  that  of  the  Persians  and  the 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  47 

Indians,  and  to  that  end  accompanied 
the  Emperor  Gordian  on  his  campaign 
against  the  Persians.  He  had  got  no 
farther  than  Mesopotamia  when  Gordian 
was  murdered,  and  Plotinus  was  lucky  to 
get  safe  back  to  Antioch.  This  was  as 
near  as  he  came  to  the  sources  of  Indian 
wisdom.  Deussen,  than  whom  no  one 
is  better  qualified  to  speak,  seems  to 
me  right  in  the  conclusion  that  "  the 
remarkable  agreements  between  Neopla- 
tonic  and  Indian  ideas  are  to  be 
explained  solely  by  essential  affinity, 
not  by  historical  dependence."  51 

The  system  of  Plotinus  is,  as  I  have 
said  elsewhere,  "  a  summation,  or  rather 
synthesis,  of  the  whole  movement  of 
Greek  metaphysics  from  the  Eleatics 
down,  and  there  is  nothing  in  it  that  is 
not  thus  adequately  accounted  for;  while 
the  characteristic  features  of  this  system 
have  no  parallel  in  Indian  philosophy  " 
—  I  mean,  the  theory  of  emanations  by 


48  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

which  he  endeavors  to  bridge  the  im- 
passable gulf  between  the  Absolute  and 
a  real  world,  and  which,  in  inverse  order, 
are  the  stages  by  which  the  fallen  soul 
ascends  to  God. 

IV 

Primitive  Christianity  received  the 
eschatology  of  contemporary  Palestinian 
Judaism,  the  general  features  of  which 
were  that  at  death  the  disembodied 
soul  went  to  an  abode  of  blessedness  or  a 
prison-house  of  misery  according  to  its 
desert.  In  the  general  resurrection  at  the 
end  of  the  age  the  soul  would  be  reunited 
with  the  body,  which  to  this  end  would 
be  raised  from  the  tomb,  and  thus  man 
would  stand  at  the  judgment  bar  of  God 
to  receive  the  final  award,  a  paradise  of 
delight  for  the  righteous  and  a  hell  of 
fire  for  the  wicked.52  In  this  scheme  there 
was  no  room  for  the  migration  of  the 
soul  from  one  body  to  another.  Some  of 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  49 

the  Hellenized  Jews  adopted  Platonic 
ideas  of  pre-existence  and  immortality, 
and  Philo  has  a  doctrine  of  reincarna- 
tion, different,  however,  from  the  com- 
mon notions  of  metempsychosis.53 

The  resurrection  of  the  body  was  a 
stumbling-block  to  all  who  had  a  tinc- 
ture of  Greek  education,  not  merely 
because  the  reconstitution  of  a  long-dis- 
sipated body  out  of  its  original  elements 
was  beyond  the  most  elastic  imagination 
for  the  miraculous,  but  because  the  re- 
incarceration  of  the  soul  in  its  prison- 
house  of  flesh  —  though  it  were  to 
dwell  in  an  earthly  or  other-earthly 
paradise  —  was  the  greatest  evil  they 
could  think  of.  Paul  meets  this  feeling 
at  least  half  way:  the  resurrection  of  the 
body  is  not  a  restoration  of  the  old 
material,  or  animal,  body;  it  is  the  in- 
vestment of  the  soul  with  a  new  "  spirit- 
ual "  body,  for  flesh  and  blood  cannot 
inherit  the  kingdom  of  God.54 


50  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

The  Gnostics,  with  their  dualistic 
hostility  to  matter  as  inherently  evil, 
rejected  the  resurrection  of  the  body,  and 
many  of  them,  as  has  been  said,  held  to 
the  transmigration  of  souls.55  Against  the 
objections  of  Gentiles  and  heretics, 
Christian  apologists  like  Athenagoras 
proved  their  stalwart  faith  by  affirming 
the  resurrection  in  its  most  material 
form.  The  Apostles'  Creed  makes  the 
resurrection  of  the  flesh  one  of  its  cardi- 
nal articles; 56  Tertullian  gives  its  sense 
in  his  uncompromising  way  when  he 
says:  "  resurget  igitur  caro,  et  quidem 
omnis,  et  quidem  ipsa,  et  quidem  Integra"™ 

The  Alexandrian  Fathers,  following 
Paul,  denied  the  resurrection  of  the 
flesh;  their  conception  of  the  immor- 
tality of  the  soul,  like  that  of  their  pre- 
cursor, Philo,  was  essentially  Platonic, 
and  Origen  is  accused  by  Theophilus  of 
teaching  that  the  soul  was  frequently 
re-embodied  and  repeatedly  experienced 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  51 

death.58  From  his  own  writings,  however, 
it  appears  that,  while  Origen,  in  his 
theory  of  the  consummation  of  being, 
held  that  the  same  soul  might  be 
variously  embodied  in  successive  worlds, 
he  did  not  accept  metempsychosis  in  the 
usual  meaning  of  the  term.59 

It  has  been  asserted  that  the  doctrine 
of  reincarnation  was  formally  con- 
demned by  a  Church  Council  in  the 
sixth  century,  and  the  inference  is  drawn 
that  prior  to  that  time  it  had  been  cur- 
rent and  uncondemned  in  the  Church.60 
The  Council  referred  to  leveled  its 
anathema,  however,  not  at  reincarna- 
tion —  of  which  it  makes  no  mention  at 
all  —  but  at  the  Origenistic  heresies  of 
the  pre-existence  of  souls  and  the  final 
restoration  of  all  beings  (dTrofcardoTcuns).61 
That  individuals  here  and  there  held 
Platonic  or  Neoplatonic  conceptions  of 
metempsychosis  is  not  remarkable;62 
but  that  the  belief  had  any  general  cur- 


52  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

rency  there  is  neither  evidence  nor 
probability. 

In  the  East,  where  Gnostic  sects  and 
Gnostic  influences  obstinately  persisted, 
the  doctrine  of  metempsychosis  also 
survived.  It  had  a  place  in  the  eclectic 
religion  of  Mani,  with  a  function  which 
shows  fundamentally  Western  rather 
than  Indian  affinities,  though  Indian 
influence  is  plainly  seen  in  related  parts 
of  his  system,  for  instance,  in  the  rules 
(for  the  Elect)  against  injuring  any  liv- 
ing thing,  which  are  carried  to  as  great 
lengths  as  the  principle  of  Ahimsa  in  the 
extremest  Indian  sects.63 

Among  Mohammedans  the  difficulty 
of  reconciling  the  sufferings  of  innocent 
children  and  dumb  animals  with  the 
goodness  or  even  the  justice  of  God  led 
some  of  the  liberal  theologians  (Murta- 
zilites)  to  seek  a  solution  in  sins  com- 
mitted in  a  former  existence.  The  same 
opinion  is  said  to  have  been  entertained 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  53 

by  some  mediaeval  Nestorians.  It  ap- 
pears also  among  the  Jewish  Karaites. 
There  was  large  interchange  of  ideas 
among  these  schools  or  parties,  which, 
besides  common  principles,  had  a  natu- 
ral bond  of  sympathy  in  the  fact  that 
they  were  all  in  the  like  condemnation 
in  the  eyes  of  the  orthodoxy  of  their 
several  religions. 

Indian,  particularly  Buddhist,  in- 
fluence was  also  strong  in  that  region  and 
time;  the  Buddhist  idea  of  Nirvana  is 
unmistakable  in  the  later  Oriental  Sufis, 
and  similar  methods  of  attainment  were 
practised.  It  may  be  inferred,  therefore, 
that  knowledge  of  Buddhism  contributed 
to  the  currency  of  the  belief  in  rebirth 
among  Oriental  Christians  and  Jews  as 
well  as  Moslems. 

Reincarnation  is  fundamental  to  the 
doctrine  of  the  Imam  as  held  by  the 
Shira  Moslems;  it  was  developed  in  a 
characteristic  form  by  the  Ismarilis,  and 


54  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

is  a  cardinal  doctrine  of  Babism.  The 
Druses  believe  that  the  souls  of  the 
righteous  (Druses)  pass  at  death  into 
progressively  more  perfect  embodiments 
till  they  reach  a  stage  at  which  they  are 
re-absorbed  in  the  godhead,  while  the 
wicked  are  born  in  lower  condition. 
Their  teaching  allows  transmigration 
only  within  human  kind,  but  the  less 
instructed  extend  it  to  animals.  The 
Nusairis  believe  that  the  souls  of  the 
wicked  are  born  again  as  animals,  accord- 
ing to  the  kind  and  degree  of  their  sin 
becoming  cats,  asses,  wolves,  and  the 
like. 

In  the  Jewish  Kabbala,  which  has 
preserved  so  much  ancient  gnosticism, 
metempsychosis  is  an  essential  part  of 
the  system.  The  destiny  of  the  soul  is 
to  return  to  the  Infinite  Source  from 
which  it  emanated.64  This  goal  can  only 
be  attained  when  all  the  perfections 
that  are  potential  in  it  are  realized;  until 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  55 

then  it  passes  from  body  to  body  con- 
tinually. According  to  some  of  the  later 
Kabbalists,  this  round  of  rebirth,  in 
which  the  soul  of  a  man  may  not  only  be 
incarnated  in  another  human  body  but 
in  that  of  an  animal  suitable  to  its  former 
character,  will  come  to  an  end  only 
when  the  Messiah  establishes  a  new 
moral  order. 

Though  the  philosophical  thinkers  in 
general  combatted  the  doctrine,  some, 
like  Abrabanel,  adopted  the  theory  of 
metempsychosis;  he  argues  —  antici- 
pating a  more  modern  turn  of  thought 
-  that  God  thus  gives  another  chance  to 
the  soul  of  one  who,  urged  by  his  tem- 
perament, commits  a  great  sin  such  as 
murder  or  adultery,  or  to  one  who  died 
in  youth  without  opportunity  to  do 
good  works. 

In  the  Middle  Ages  some  heretical 
Christian  sects  of  dualistic  principles, 
such  as  the  Kathari,  had  a  dogma  of 


$6  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

I 

metempsychosis  similar  to  that  of  the 

Manichaeans  and  not  improbably  de- 
rived from  them.  It  reappears  in  the 
belief  of  the  modern  Russian  sect  of  the 
Doukhobors,  whether  as  a  survival  from 
these  mediaeval  heresies  or  derived  from 
some  more  recent  source  is  uncertain65 
~In  all  these  Western  survivals  or  re- 
vivals of  the  doctrine  the  influence  of  the 
later  Neoplatonism  is  evident;  only 
sporadically  can  an  Indian  (Buddhistic) 
strain  be  recognized  or  surmised.  The 
re-embodiments  are  —  at  least,  for  those 
who  know  the  origin  and  destiny  of  the 
soul  —  stages  of  a  progressive  purifica- 
tion and  elevation,  through  which  it  re- 
ascends  to  its  divine  source. 

It  is  not  surprising,  therefore,  that 
with  the  revival  of  Platonism  and 
Plotinianism  at  the  renaissance,  the 
theory  of  metempsychosis  was  revived 
in  European  philosophy.  Cosimo  de'  Me- 
dici's Florentine  Academy  was  founded 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  57 

to  cultivate  and  expound  the  philosophy 
of  Plato;  Marsilio  Ficino  translated  not 
only  Plato  but  Plotinus  and  the  so-called 
Hermes  Trismegistos,  and  wrote  a  trea- 
tise on  the  Platonic  doctrine  of  immor- 
tality. From  Plotinus,  and  from  the 
Kabbala  (which  had  for  him  as  for  many 
Christian  scholars  in  the  following  cen- 
turies a  singular  fascination),  Giordano 
Bruno  derived  the  theory  of  transmigra- 
tion which  he  expounds  in  various  places 
in  his  writings,  especially  in  that  entitled 
"  De  gli  heroici  furori,"  which  —  it  is  of 
interest  to  us  to  note  —  was  dedicated  to 
Sir  Philip  Sidney.66 

V 

Lessing's  conception  of  history,  and 
especially  the  history  of  religion,  as  a 
divine  education,  by  which,  from  ele- 
mentary beginnings,  mankind  is  led  on 
stage  by  stage  toward  the  perfection 
which  is  the  goal  of  God's  ways  with 


58  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

men,  had  for  a  corollary  that  the  indi- 
vidual must  traverse  from  end  to  end  the 
same  path  by  which  the  race  achieves  its 
destiny.  It  is  inconceivable  that  this 
should  be  accomplished  within  the 
limits  of  a  single  life  —  that  a  soul  should 
be  in  the  same  existence  upon  the  stage 
of  the  Old  Testament  religion,  and  of 
Christianity,  and  of  that  new  eternal 
gospel  that  lies  beyond  them  both. 

But  why  may  not  every  man  have 
been  in  this  world  more  than  once  ?  Is 
this  hypothesis  so  absurd  because  it  is 
the  oldest;  because  the  human  mind, 
before  it  was  dissipated  and  weakened 
by  the  sophistries  of  the  school,  at  once 
came  upon  it  ?  Why  should  I  not  in  a 
former  existence  have  progressed  toward 
my  perfection  as  far  as  mere  temporal 
punishments  and  rewards  can  bring  a 
man  ?  And  why  not,  in  another,  have 
made  all  the  progress  which  the  prospect 
of  eternal  rewards  so  powerfully  furthers? 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  59 

Why  should  I  not  come  again  as  often  as 
I  am  sent  to  gain  new  knowledge,  new 
abilities  ?  Do  I  carry  away  so  much 
from  a  single  life  that  it  is  not  worth 
while  to  return  ?67 

These  paragraphs  furnished  Herder 
the  text  for  an  essay,  "Palingenesie.  Vom 
Wiederkommen  menschlicher  Seelen."68 
Herder  discusses  the  origin  of  the  belief 
in  transmigration,  which  he  rightly  finds, 
not  in  speculation,  but  in  savage  psy- 
chology; it  is  a  "  Wahn  sinnlicher  Men- 
schen."  In  the  form  in  which  it  was 
developed  by  the  Brahmans  in  India  — 
the  doctrine  of  a  retributive  metem- 
psychosis, according  to  which  the  mis- 
deeds of  one  life  are  expiated  in  another 
embodiment  —  Herder  emphatically  re- 
jects it:  Why  does  this  unhappy  man 
suffer,  without  knowing  for  what  he 
suffers  ?  If  we  consider  it  from  a  moral 
point  of  view,  the  expiation  is  extreme: 
one  who  is  no  longer  a  man  suffers  for 


60  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

what  he  did  when  a  man,  in  a  condition 
which  deprives  him  of  all  capacity  of 
moral  action,  that  is,  of  amendment  and 
atonement.  On  the  other  hand,  morality 
out  of  consideration,  how  slight  the 
expiation !  He  who  was  once  a  tiger  in 
human  form  is  now  a  real  tiger,  without 
obligation  or  conscience,  which  formerly 
sometimes  troubled  him.  .  .  .  Instead 
of  being  punished,  he  is  rewarded;  he  is 
now  what  he  wished  to  be  and  in  his 
human  form  could  only  be  imperfectly. 
The  considerations  which  inclined 
Lessing  to  the  hypothesis  do  not  con- 
vince Herder.  The  solution  it  offers  of 
the  suffering  of  the  wretched,  the  de- 
formed, the  oppressed,  does  not  really 
solve  the  problem;  it  assumes  a  destiny 
or  a  deity  that  robs  a  man  of  the  enjoy- 
ment of  this  life  for  the  transgressions  of 
a  former  life;  and  since  the  victim  is 
unconscious  of  his  fault,  the  infliction 
can  have  no  rational  or  moral  end  of 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  61 

discipline  —  it  is  mere  vengeance,  and  a 
deity  which  avenges  wrong-doing  with- 
out seeking  to  make  the  wrong-doer 
better  is  an  impossible  idea. 

To  know  what  is  essential  to  the  hap- 
piness of  mankind  in  particular  and  in 
general,  we  do  not  need  to  have  been 
repeatedly  on  this  earth;  and  if  we  have 
in  one  life  neglected  to  learn  it,  we 
should  probably  neglect  it  in  many.  It 
is  not  more  knowledge  that  is  of  chief 
importance,  but  character;  and  character 
is  possible  in  all  ages  and  conditions. 
There  have  always  been  great  and  good 
men,  and  we  also  can  be  such;  this  is  the 
task  that  is  set  us  in  this,  the  only  life  we 
know  —  to  achieve  a  good  character.  It 
is  a  Palingenesia,  a  rebirth  of  ideals  and 
motives,  in  this  life  that  is  needful. 

Lessing  conceived  of  reincarnation  as 
a  way  by  which  a  human  soul  might 
advance  stage  by  stage  in  knowledge  and 
virtue  to  perfection,  repeating  in  itself 


62  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

the  progress  of  the  race  in  its  divine 
education.  An  older  contemporary  of 
Lessing's,  the  Swiss  naturalist  Charles 
Bonnet,  while  expressly  repudiating  the 
Pythagorean  doctrine  of  metempsy- 
chosis—  which  he  believed  to  come 
ultimately  from  India  —  developed  in 
detail  the  hypothesis  that  the  souls  of 
the  lower  animals  survive,  and  are  suc- 
cessively re-embodied  in  animals  of 
higher  rank  in  the  scale  of  classification 
until  they  arrive  at  the  perfection  of 
human  souls.69  Charles  Fourier  worked 
transmigration,  in  peculiar  form,  into 
his  fantastic  scheme  of  social  and 
economic  progress.70 

Louis  Figuier,  in  "  Le  lendemain  de  la 
mort,  ou  la  vie  future  selon  la  science," 
not  only  repeated  the  ancient  arguments 
—  reincarnation  is  the  only  explanation 
of  the  presence  of  man  on  the  earth,  of 
the  sad  and  unequal  conditions  of  human 
life,  of  the  fate  of  children  dying  in 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  63 

infancy,  etc.,  —  and  extended  it,  like 
Bonnet,  into  natural  history,  the  scale 
of  animal  types  being  steps  in  the  ascent 
of  souls  —  the  soul  of  a  zoophyte  or  a 
mollusc,  for  example,  being  promoted  to 
an  articulate  —  but  introduces  it  into 
astronomy  and  astrophysics,  reviving 
thus,  in  modern  scientific  guise,  ancient 
Greek  adventures.  The  sun  is  the  abode 
of  purely  spiritual  beings;  its  rays  are 
emanations  (souls)  perpetually  sent  out 
by  the  sun  through  space  to  the  earth  or 
the  planets;  the  sun's  heat  is  kept  up, 
not,  as  some  astronomers  have  conjec- 
tured, by  a  bombardment  of  asteroids, 
but  by  the  return  of  souls,  ardent  and 
pure  spirits,  continually  replacing  those 
which  are  emanated  from  it. 

In  the  revival  of  the  theory  of  metem- 
psychosis in  the  nineteenth  century,  the 
influence  of  Indian  thought  had  a  con- 
siderable part.  The  Bhagavad-gita  was 
Englished  by  Wilkins  in  1785;  in  1801 


64  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

Anquetil  Duperron  published  a  Latin 
translation  of  a  modern  Persian  version 
of  the  Upanishads  made  at  the  instance 
of  the  Mogul  Emperor  and  eclectic 
theologian,  Akbar.  The  impression 
which  the  Upanishads  in  Duperron's 
translation  made  upon  Schopenhauer  is 
well  known.  Other  translations  of  phil- 
osophical and  religious  texts  followed  in 
rapid  succession,  until  the  greater  part  of 
this  literature  has  been  rendered  into 
the  languages  of  modern  Europe.  The 
philosophical  systems  of  India  have  been 
interpreted  by  a  succession  of  illustrious 
scholars  from  Colebrooke's  day  to  our 
own;  the  Upanishads  and  the  Vedanta, 
in  particular,  have  been  studied  with 
increasing  insight  and  appreciation.  In- 
terest in  Indian  thought  has  been  stimu- 
lated by  popular  literature;  societies  for 
the  study  of  the  Vedanta  under  the 
guidance  of  native  teachers  have  been 
formed;  texts  have  been  translated  and 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  65 

expositions  published  by  Hindu  scholars 
for  Western  readers;  a  kind  of  mission- 
ary propaganda  has  been  carried  on  both 
in  Europe  and  America.  "  Theosophy," 
also,  with  its  travesty  of  Indian  ideas, 
has  contributed  to  make  transmigration 
familiar. 

The  modern  variations  of  the  doctrine 
of  metempsychosis,  both  such  as  have 
arisen  in  the  West  and  those  in  which 
Indian  thought  is  modernized  and  ac- 
comodated  to  Western  modes  of  thought, 
differ  from  the  classical  types  by  intro- 
ducing the  idea  of  evolution,  and  often 
endeavor  to  establish  the  theory  on  a 
scientific  basis.  The  successive  rein- 
carnations are  stages  in  the  soul's  prog- 
ress toward  perfection;  the  series  is 
sometimes  extended  from  the  lowest 
animate  forms  upward  to  man;  others, 
as  we  have  seen,  connect  it  with  theories 
of  social  and  economic  development,  or 
with  physical  hypotheses. 


66  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

However  natural  such  a  way  of  con- 
ceiving the  subject  may  be  to  our  evolu- 
tionary habit  of  mind,  it  is  entirely 
foreign  to  the  thought  of  the  ancients  in 
the  East  or  West.71  In  all  the  ancient 
theories  of  metempsychosis  the  soul  is  by 
origin  and  nature  divine,  eternal,  co-essen- 
tial with  the  Absolute  or  identical  with  it. 
From  this  high  estate  it  fell  by  its  own 
fault,  or  from  this  unity  it  is  separated  by 
ignorance  of  itself  and  of  the  Absolute, 
and  is  in  consequence  imprisoned  in  a 
mortal  body  and  destined  after  death 
to  be  re-embodied  until  its  guilt  be 
expiated  or  its  ignorance  dispelled  by  the 
supreme  knowledge.  Its  goal  is  the 
recovery  of  its  lost  estate,  the  return  to 
its  source;  "  the  end  is,  not  to  be  sinless, 
but  to  be  God."  72 

Metempsychosis  among  the  Greeks 
was  in  the  beginning  an  expiation  of 
guilt,  and  the  conception  of  a  fall  of  the 
soul,  moral  or  intellectual,  persists  in  the 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  67 

more  speculative  systems.  In  India  it  is 
the  inexorable  law  of  cause  and  effect, 
the  deed  and  its  consequence,  which  pur- 
sues man  from  existence  to  existence. 
It  had  no  beginning  in  time,  and  has  no 
end  but  by  the  attainment  of  the  tran- 
scendental knowledge  the  possession  of 
which  is  to  be  the  Absolute.73 

The  biological  evolution  of  souls  from 
some  primitive  psychic  cell  to  the  fullness 
of  humanity  or  of  divinity,  as  some  of  our 
contemporaries  imagine  it,  is  a  new 
hypothesis,  which  owes  more  to  the 
century  of  Darwin  than  to  the  philoso- 
phies of  Greece  or  India. 

VI 

A  theory  which  has  been  embraced  by  so 
large  a  part  of  mankind,  of  many  races 
and  religions,  and  has  commended  itself 
to  some  of  the  most  profound  thinkers 
of  all  time,  cannot  be  lightly  dismissed. 
In  its  classic  forms,  as  we  have  seen, 


68  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

the  soul  is  in  essence  eternal  and  un- 
changeable; it  does  not  originate  in 
time,  either  by  creation  or  by  propaga- 
tion; consequently  the  difficulty  of 
conceiving  how  what  has  a  genesis  in 
time  can  be  exempt  from  dissolution  in 
time  does  not  arise.74 

The  hypothesis  offers  an  explanation 
of  the  inequalities  among  men  in  mental 
and  moral  capacity  and  predisposition, 
as  well  as  in  soundness  and  health  of 
body  and  station  and  fortune  in  life.  In 
these  things  there  is  nothing  arbitrary 
and  nothing  accidental;  everything  is 
the  determinate  consequence  of  former 
acts,  thoughts,  volitions,  and  desires,  or 
of  the  totality  of  character.  It  is  a  kind  of 
doctrine  of  heredity;  only,  a  man  does 
not  inherit  from  his  ancestors,  but  from 
himself  in  a  former  existence;  to  speak 
in  a  paradox,  his  parents  are  a  part  of  his 
inheritance. 

If  this  determination  of  a  man's  lot  by 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  69 

his  deeds  be  regarded  from  the  point  of 
view  of  retribution,  it  seems  to  be  in 
kind  and  measure  more  equitable  than 
the  incommensurate  doctrine  of  endless 
punishment  in  hell  for  the  wrong-doing 
of  a  brief  human  life. 

If  man's  earthly  existence  be  con- 
ceived as  a  probation,  it  must  be  admit- 
ted that  in  any  one  life  men  are  put 
upon  this  probation  under  very  unequal 
conditions  of  every  kind,  and  that  the 
theory  of  a  series  of  embodiments  in 
which  the  soul  is  tested  under  various 
conditions  accords  better  with  our  no- 
tions of  justice  in  the  order  of  things. 

Finally,  if  an  end  of  perfection  is  set 
for  the  soul,  metempsychosis  affords  the 
opportunity  for  a  progressive  approach 
to  that  infinite  attainment,  whether  the 
latter  be  a  return  to  an  initial  state 
from  which  the  soul  in  some  way  lapsed, 
or  the  development  of  the  soul's  latent 
potentialities. 


70  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

The  objection  was  long  ago  urged  by 
Epicurus  against  the  Pythagorean  doc- 
trine, that,  inasmuch  as  the  soul  has  no 
memory  of  former  existences,  and  there 
is  no  conscious  personal  identity  running 
through  the  series  of  rebirths,  the  conse- 
quences fall  virtually  upon  another,  who 
knows  not  the  cause,  and  cannot  be 
made  wiser  or  better  by  the  punishment 
he  bears.76 

Similarly,  if  we  think  of  the  reincar- 
nations as  probationary,  the  soul  carries 
over  no  experience  from  one  to  another, 
and  there  is  thus  no  cumulative  profit 
from  the  experience  of  former  probations. 
And,  considered  as  development,  the 
soul  begins  each  new  stage,  not  where  it 
left  off  in  the  last  life,  but,  so  far  as  con- 
sciousness goes,  starts  de  novo]  it  is  as 
if,  at  the  several  stages  of  one  life-time, 
all  memory  of  what  went  before  should 
be  obliterated,  so  that  the  grown  man 
had  no  knowledge  of  himself  as  a  youth, 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  71 

and  consequently  no  light  from  his  earlier 
experience. 

To  this  objection  various  answers  have 
been  made  by  defenders  of  the  doctrine. 
Perhaps  a  better  one  may  be  offered  by 
recent  theories  of  the  unconscious  and 
the  subconscious.  From  these  premises 
it  might  be  admitted  that  the  memory 
of  former  existences  does  not  emerge  in 
normal  consciousness,  and  yet  affirmed 
that  in  the  subconscious  region  of  the 
mind  there  is  not  only  a  continuity  but 
an  organized  memory  of  former  experi- 
ences. But,  granting  all  that  can  be 
said  for  this  hypothesis,  it  remains  that 
there  is  no  intelligence  in  the  sub- 
liminal realm,  and  no  moral  quality; 
and  consequently  the  only  conditions 
under  which  we  can  conceive  of  intel- 
lectual and  moral  progress  or  recovery 
from  life  to  life  are  lacking. 

This  objection  applies  with  peculiar 
force  to  the  modern  rationalizations  of 


72  METEMPSYCHOSIS 

the  belief  in  reincarnation  which  en- 
deavor to  give  it  the  semblance  of  a 
scientific  hypothesis;  for  they,  by  their 
very  profession,  take  it  upon  them 
to  prove  the  theory  reasonable.  The 
genuine  doctrine  has  never  been  con- 
cerned to  demonstrate  itself  to  the 
finite  understanding;  it  finds  its  au- 
thority in  revelation,  its  verification  in 
ecstatic  experience;  and  in  this  higher 
assurance  needs  not  be  troubled  by 
what,  from  its  point  of  view,  are  ration- 
alistic cavils.  Its  philosophy  is  an 
ontology  which  is  above  reason,  incom- 
prehensible, and  apprehensible  only  by 
intuition. 

In  this  system  reincarnation  has  a 
logical  place;  the  attempt  to  substitute 
biological  analogies  for  the  metaphysical 
foundation  is  a  relapse  into  the  crude 
physiological  psychology  which  Indian 
and  Greek  thought  overcame.  Metem- 
psychosis without  its  absolute  origin 


METEMPSYCHOSIS  73 

and  its  transcendent  goal  is  a  pseudo- 
scientific  hypothesis  which  has  neither 
philosophic  meaning  nor  religious  worth. 
It  seems  often  to  be  inspired  by  that 
lust  of  life  in  which  the  thinkers  of  India 
discovered  the  root  of  death  —  of  innum- 
erable deaths.76  To  those  whose  belief 
in  reincarnation  is  animated  by  such 
desires,  the  wise  will  be  inclined  to 
address  the  words  of  Aeneas,  when  in  his 
visit  to  the  nether-world  he  saw  a  troop 
of  souls  about  to  ascend  to  earth  and  be 
re-embodied: 

"  O  pater,  anne  aliquas  ad  caelum  hinc 

ire  putandum  est 
Sublimas  animas,  iterumque  in  tarda 

reverti 
Corpora  ?    Quae  lucis  miseris  tarn  dira 

cupido  ?  " 


NOTES 


NOTES 


1.  Mer€At^xworis  is  the  commonest  Greek  word 
for  the  transmigration  of  souls.    Other  terms  are 
ira\Lyyeve<Tia  (said  by  Servius  to  be  Pythagoras' 
word),  nereixru  /idraws,  and  ^erayyia^.   These 
are  employed  without  any  difference  of  meaning, 
as  are  the  modern  equivalents,  re-embodiment,  re- 
incarnation, rebirth,  etc. 

2.  Manu,  xii,  59  ff. 

3.  7ta/.,v,  38. 

4.  Ibid.,  xi,  53.  —  Their  suffering  shows  that 
they  were  sinners,  and  therefore  to  be  shunned. 

5.  Timaeus,  90  f.;  Phaedo,  8if.  An  allegorical 
interpretation  was  given  to  these  passages  by  later 
Platonists. 

6.  Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad,  iii,  2,  13. 

7.  I.  e.,  the  law  of  the  act  and  its  consequence. 

8.  Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad,  iv,  4,  5. 

9.  This  implication  is  contested  by  Windisch. 

10.  Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad,   iv,  2,  3. 

11.  Chandogya-Upanishad,  v,  10,  7. 

12.  Kaushitaki-Upanishad,     i,     2.      Deussen, 
Sechzig  Upanishads,  2  ed.,  p.  24. 

77 


78  NOTES 

13.  The     Maitrayana-Upanishad,    in     which 
this  disgust  is  strongly  expressed  (i,  3),  is  post- 
Buddhistic.  The  pessimism  of  Kathaka-Upanishad, 
i,  26  f.,is  comparatively  mild.  The  Sankhya  philos- 
ophy, and  Jainism  and  Buddhism  under  its  in- 
fluence, are  much  more  deeply  pessimistic.   There 
is  a  similar  difference  between  Neoplatonism  and 
Gnosticism  or  Manichaeism. 

14.  Neti,neti.    Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad,  ii, 
3,  6;  iii,  9,  26,  etc. 

15.  Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad,  iv,  4,  6  f . 

1 6.  Whether  there  is  an  immortal  existence  be- 
yond for  the  saint  who  has  attained  Nirvana,  is  a 
question  to  which  Buddha  gave  no  answer. 

17.  To  be  strictly  accurate,  we  should  say,  the 
psychology  of  the  most  influential  schools. 

1 8.  Giles's  translation. 

19.  The  traditional  date  is  55  B.C.  (return  of 
Ming-ti's  envoys);    but  there  is  reason  to  think 
that  the  Chinese  had  come  into  contact  with  Bud- 
dhism as  early  as  the  second  century  B.C. 

20.  Odyssey,  xi.  These  additions  to  the  Nekyia 
are  of  Orphic  origin. 

21.  Olymp.  2,  56  ff.  Pindar  is  here,  as  well  as  in 
the  Threnos  (Frg.  133)  quoted  below,  drawing  on 
the  teaching  of  Sicilian  mysteries.    Compare  also 
Frg.  129-130,  131,  132. 


NOTES  79 

22.  Herodotus,  ii,  123.  The  Egyptian  belief,  as 
Herodotus  reports  it,  was  that  the  soul  of  man  is 
immortal,  and  when  the  body  dies  passes  into 
another  animal;  only  after  it  has  been  successively 
embodied  in  all  kinds  of  land  animals  and  fishes 
and  birds  does  it  again  enter  a  human  body;  the 
round  consumes  three  thousand  years.  No  trace  of 
such   a   doctrine   has   been   found   in   Egyptian 
sources,  though  it  is  not  difficult  to  explain  the 
misunderstanding. 

23.  A  familiar  presentation  of  the  Pythagorean 
doctrine  is  Ovid,  Metamorphoses,  xv,  153  ff. 

24.  Frg.  117  Diels.  The  memory  of  such  trans- 
migrations was  exceptional.    Besides  Empedocles, 
the  soul  of  Pythagoras  had  received  from  Hermes 
the  gift  of  remembering  all  the  plants  and  animals 
into  which  it  had  come.  The  same  power  was  pos- 
sessed by  Apollonius  of  Tyana.     These  reminis- 
cences provoke  the  scoffs  of  Xenophanes  (Diog. 
Laert.  viii,  36)  and  Lucian  (Gallus,  c.  18  f.). 

25.  Frg.  115  Diels. 

26.  As  in  ancient  Greek  law  blood-guilt  was 
expiated  by  the  exile  of  the  man-slayer  for  a  term 
of  years. 

27.  Pindar,  Frg.  133.  —  Heroes  are  divine. 

28.  Olymp.  2,  75  ff. 

29.  The   "  thrice  ten  thousand  seasons "  of 


8o  NOTES 

Empedocles  make  ten  thousand  years,  each  year 
in  the  old  calendar  having  three  seasons. 

30.  Parcite,  vaticinor,  cognatas  caede  nefanda 
Exturbare  animas,  nee  sanguine  sanguis  alatur.  — 
Ovid,  Metam.  xv,  174  f. 

How  strict  a  vegetarian  Pythagoras  was,  was 
disputed  in  antiquity.  See  Diels,  Fragmente  der 
Vorsokratiker, 3  i,  31. 

31.  Phaedrus,  246  ff. 

32.  Never,  in  this  first  embodiment,  a  lower 
animal. 

33.  The  three  choices  of  the  philosophic  life  cor- 
respond to  the  three  periods  in  which  the  soul  keeps 
itself  from  all  evil  in  Pindar  (above,  p.  29). 

34.  Besides  the  passages  in  the  Phaedrus  and 
the  Republic,  reference  should  be  made  to  Gorgias, 
523  ff.,  and  Phaedo,  109  ff. ;  to  which  may  be  added 
Axiochus,  371  (not  by  Plato).  The  speculations  of 
the  Timaeus  are  of  a  different  order. 

35.  Phaedo,  67,  C-D. 

36.  Cerinthus,  the  Carpocratians,  Basilidians, 
and  others. 

37.  'OfjLOOvffLOS.    Plotinus,  Enn.  iv,  7,  5;  it  is  a 
divine  thing,  from  the  realms  above  (iv,  8,  5,  etc.). 
Concerning  the  descent  of  the  soul  Plotinus  finds 
Empedocles,  Heraclitus,  and  Plato  in  accord  (Ibid.) . 

38.  Enn.  v,  i,  i. 


NOTES  Sz 

39.  Enn.  iv,  8,  8;  cf.  iv,  3,  12;  "  souls  are  not 
cut  off  from  their  origin  and  the  Nous." 

40.  Enn.  vi,  5,  7.    See  E.  Caird,  Evolution  of 
Theology  in  the  Greek  Philosophers,  ii,  295  ff. 

41.  Enn.  vi,  7,  35.    Caird,  op.  cit.  p.  300.   The 
pregnant  Greek  is  a7rXco0€ts  ets  eviratieiav  r$  K6p<#. 

42.  Enn.  iii,  2,  13. 

43.  Enn.  iv,  3,  12. 

44.  The  successors  of  Plotinus  (Porphyry,  lam- 
blichus)  confine  transmigration  to  human  bodies. 

45.  Written  probably  about  500  A.D.    The  in- 
fluence of  these  writings  was  not  confined  to  those 
whom  we  call  the  mystics;  the  great  scholastics  of 
the  East  and  the  West  are  no  less  in  debt  to  them. 

46.  Sir  William  Jones,  Colebrooke,  Barth61emy 
Saint-Hilaire,  L.  v.  Schroeder;   see  Garbe,  Sam- 
khya-Philosophie,  90  ff. 

47.  Especially  L.  v.  Schroeder,  Pythagoras  und 
die  Inder. 

48.  See  above,  pp.  iof.. 

49.  The  deterministic  principle,  tofayKri,  cor- 
responds only  in  determinism. 

50.  In  India  the  fatal  ignorance  and  the  incar- 
nation of  which  it  is  the  cause  have  neither  begin- 
ning nor  end;  it  is  not  a  finite  guilt  that  can  be 
expiated. 

51.  Deussen,  Allgemeine  Geschichte  der  Phil- 
osophic, ii,  i,  p.  485. 


82 

52.  These  beliefs  are  similar  to  those  of  the  Per- 
sian religion,  and  not  independent  of  the  latter. 

53.  De  somniis,  i,  §  138  f.  (p.  641  f.,  Mangey). 

54.  I  Cor.  15;  cf.  II  Cor.  5. 

55.  Tertullian  combats  this  doctrine  both  in  the 
Greek   philosophers    and   in    the    Gnostics    who 
adopted  it  from  them;   see  De  anima,  cc.  28  ff., 

34  ff- 

56.  'AvavTCLffis  rrjs  (rap/cos,  resurrectio  carnis. 

57.  This  material  identity  was  necessary  to  jus- 
tice:   soul  and  body  which  sinned  together  are 
punished  together. 

58.  See  Jerome,  Ep.  98,  10  f. 

59.  De  principiis,  i,  6,  i  ff.;  iii,  5,  6;  iii,  6,  6;  cf. 
ii,  9,  6;  i,  7;  Contra  Celsum,  iv,  83. 

60.  So,  e.  g.j  Abhedananda,  Vedanta  Philos- 
ophy.   Three  Lectures   (1899);    Orlando  Smith, 
Eternalism  (1902). 

61.  Mansi,  ix,  395;   cf.  Hefele,  Concilien-Ge- 
schichte,  ii,  772. 

62.  e.  g.  Nemesius,  De  natura  hominis,  who 
agrees  with  Porphyry  and  lamblichus  that  human 
souls  migrate  only  into  human  bodies. 

63.  Acta  Archelai. 

64.  Zohar  ii,  99  b,  quoted  in  Jewish  Encyclo- 
pedia, xii,  232. 

65.  I  am  indebted  for  information  about  the 
Doukhobors  to  Professor  Aurelio  Palmieri. 


NOTES  83 

66.  De  gli  heroic!  furori,  pp.  618  ff.,  661  ff.;  cf. 
Cabala  del  cavallo  Pegaseo,  pp.  585  ff.,  589  (ed. 
Lagarde,  1888).     Plotinus  is  the  chief  authority. 

67.  Die   Erziehung   des   Menschengeschlechts 
(i78o),§§  93  ff.;  cf.  Lessings  Leben  und  Nachlass, 
Th.  2,  p.  77- 

68.  Zerstreute  Blatter,  Sechste  Sammlung,  1 797. 
(Ed.  Suphan,  xvi,  341  ff.)    This  essay,  with  two 
others  on  kindred  subjects,  was  translated  by 
F.  H.  Hedge  in  1848. 

69.  Palingenesie  philosophique,  1769. 

70.  Theorie  de  Tunite  universelle,  1822.  Part  of 
this  work  was  translated  by  Arthur  Brisbane. 
(New  York,  n.d.) 

71.  The  stages  in  the  re-ascent  of  the  soul  to  its 
source  —  in  Plotinus,  for  example  —  are,  it  need 
hardly  be  said,  a  very  different  thing  from  an 
evolution. 

72.  Plotinus. 

73.  In  some  of  the  Hindu  religions  the  deliver- 
ance is  wrought  by  the  grace  of  God  for  those  who 
trust  and  love  him. 

74.  That  the  pre-existence  of  souls  is  the  neces- 
sary corollary  of  their  immortality  has  been  ap- 
parent to  many,  apart  from  the  hypothesis  of 
transmigration. 

75.  Plato  seeks  to  avoid  the  apparent  injustice 


84  NOTES 

of  this  by  letting  the  souls  choose  their  lot.    See 
above,  pp.  35  f. 

76.  This  lust  for  the  life  of  the  senses  expresses 
itself  in  peculiarly  crass  form  in  Fourier,  op.  cit.,  iii, 
304  ff. 


PRINTED  AT 

THE  HARVABD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 
CAMBRIDGE,  MASS.,  U.S.A. 


RETURN  TO  the  circulation  desk  of  any 
University  of  California  Library 

or  to  the 

NORTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 
Bldg.  400,  Richmond  Field  Station 
University  of  California 
Richmond,  CA  94804-4698 

ALL  BOOKS  MAY  BE  RECALLED  AFTER  7  DAYS 

•  2-month  loans  may  be  renewed  by  calling 
(510)642-6753 

•  1-year  loans  may  be  recharged  by  bringing 
books  to  NRLF 

•  Renewals  and  recharges  may  be  made 
4  days  prior  to  due  date 


03 


'H  De 
ate 


DUE  AS  STAMPED  BELOW 


.1ULO  8  2003 


JUL072003 


DD20  15M  4-02 


YB  22975 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


